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The mile markers fly by, one every 100 seconds or so. Adrenaline rushes through your body as quickly as the wind passes through your hair.

You know you’re breaking the law, but you want to see how long you can get away with it. The rumble of the gas-fueled engine growls under the hood, and you can feel the sound in your chest as you push the accelerator pedal a little deeper into the floor.

No, the car isn’t stolen, and you’re not a suspect escaping from a grisly crime.

Being in Geneva right now would be a lot like being at the birth of the universe and witnessing the unveiling of the first stars.

It’d be completely exhilarating, awe-inspiring, and something you couldn’t wait to tell the people back home.

The Geneva Motor Show always has surprises. It’s the place automakers like to shock the industry and show the world what they are best at creating. This year had some expected surprises, if there is such a thing, but at least a couple of debuts left us wondering how soon they could reach production. Bentley and Aston Martin especially stole the show, but Lamborghini and Koenigsegg delivered cars unlike anything the world has ever seen.

Gas prices in my area are inching up again after getting into the dollar-and-a-half-per-gallon range. Today, prices at my local pump sit at around $2.15.

That’s still a far cry from the $4.75 I was paying not long ago, but not nearly high enough to make me consider giving up gas and going electric.

The consensus is similar for consumers across the nation, as electric cars haven’t made much of a dent in sales so far this year. The price premium on new electric cars just doesn’t make the investment worth it.

What about the used market, though?

There’s a wide range of EVs available used now and some of them just might offer the savings that budget shoppers desire.

I know, I know. We talk a lot about the fuel that powers our cars on these pages.

We complain about high gas prices, we get cautiously excited about low prices, we wonder if governments should increase taxes on fossil fuels, and we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of alternative-fuel vehicles.

The question always comes back to this: environmental effects. Fossil fuels are damaging to pump out of the earth, and they pollute the atmosphere when burned. Electric-powered cars don’t emit any gasses when driving, but the production of the electricity that charges them can be harmful.

Hydrogen is, theoretically, clean from all angles. A new filling station in California could change the game on how we think about fueling our cars.

How could it be true? Why would Chevrolet, which currently builds the electric/gas hybrid Volt, introduce a new electric car and call it the Bolt?

It seems that one of the top automakers in the world will resort to rhyming names of cars that are in the same class.

Some automakers employ nomenclature that use alliteration to label a certain class of vehicle, such as Ford and its SUVs that begin with E (Explorer, Escape, and Expedition) and its cars that begin with F (Fusion, Focus, and Fiesta).

That’s a strategy that makes sense. Using rhymes, as Chevy is now learning, will lead to nothing more than mockery.

As I become more of a proponent of electric vehicles, I forget that I was once firmly against them.

It took me a long time to hop on the EV bandwagon, because I wasn’t convinced the problems of limited range, questionable cold-weather reliability and the lack of charging infrastructure could be overcome.

As the years passed I’ve become more convinced that electric cars have a place. They certainly aren’t replacements for the family road-trip vehicle, but they are perfectly suitable vehicles for commuting back and forth to work.

So you think you know someone. You can be married to a woman and share life’s most intimate moments, and then, one random Sunday morning, she can say this:

“You should look up my friend Otmar and his zip-together Volkswagen bus.”

Ummm…. what?

I replied, “Who is this friend you speak of and why have I never heard about said zip-together bus?”

She said he’s a long-time family friend and that she has physically laid eyes on this bus. I promptly asked Google for more information and found what I believe to be the weirdest, and possibly coolest, conversion project I’ve ever heard of: The Stretchla.

Gas prices continue to fall, and guys like me, who lumber through town in big SUVs that swallow fuel as quickly as we suck down carmel macchiatos, are smiling, because fill-ups have gone from almost $90 to just over $50.

Saving money at the pump makes us happy, and we spend the saved money on extra macchiatos.

Yes, even macho SUV-driving guys drink macchiatos. We may not like to admit it, but we’re also interested in microcars. Why? Because sometimes we just don’t need the capability and room that giant utes offer. Sometimes we just want to drive to work quickly and cheaply.

A few microcars are hitting the market to fill that need. Two of them in particular are addressing the need for tiny driving in drastically different ways.